The Sexuality of History

Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565-1830

Susan S. Lanser

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780226187877
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

The period of reform, revolution, and reaction that characterized seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe also witnessed an intensified interest in lesbians. In scientific treatises and orientalist travelogues, in French court gossip and Dutch court records, in passionate verse, in the rising novel, and in cross-dressed flirtations on the English and Spanish stage, poets, playwrights, philosophers, and physicians were placing sapphic relations before the public eye. In The Sexuality of History, Susan S. Lanser shows how intimacies between women became harbingers of the modern, bringing the sapphic into the mainstream of some of the most significant events in Western Europe. Ideas about female same-sex relations became a focal point for intellectual and cultural contests between authority and liberty, power and difference, desire and duty, mobility and change, order and governance. Lanser explores the ways in which a historically specific interest in lesbians intersected with, and stimulated, systemic concerns that would seem to have little to do with sexuality. Departing from the prevailing trend of queer reading whereby scholars ferret out hidden content in "closeted" texts, Lanser situates overtly erotic representations within wider spheres of interest. The Sexuality of History shows that just as we can understand sexuality by studying the past, so too can we understand the past by studying sexuality.

CHAPTER ONE

How To Do the Sexuality of History

There is such an intimate relationship among the different parts of society that none of them could receive a blow without repercussions on the others.

—Jean-François Melon, Essai politique sur le commerce (1734)¹

It is a truth almost universally acknowledged, that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gave the West a host of its modern arrangements, from the trivial (eating with forks) to the triumphant (the “rights of man”) to the tragic (racial supremacy).² The tumultuous period bounded by Dutch revolts and French revolutions yielded governance by consent; a wildly inequitable global economy engineered by slaveholding empires; the stirrings of a self-conscious working class and the aspirations of a rising bourgeoisie; the incipience of secular nation-states supported by patriotic investments; the rising hegemony of print and the attendant force of public opinion; unprecedented population growth and geographic mobility; a new fealty to observable “nature” as the bedrock of truth; systemic challenges to hierarchies human and divine; a growing commitment to conjugal kinship along with an intensified interest in the distinctiveness of individual persons; and the formation of public subjects along lines of gender and color that enfranchised propertied white men as men while failing spectacularly to accord legal rights to women or full humanity to Africans.

For reasons that I will argue were intrinsic rather than incidental to these transformations, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe also witnessed an intensified interest in lesbians. In genres from scientific treatises to orientalist travelogues, in the gossip of French royal courts and the records of Dutch legal courts, in bawdy poems, domestic fictions, and cross-dressed flirtations on the English and Spanish stage, poets, playwrights, philosophers, and pundits were placing what I call sapphic subjects before the public eye.³ Writings that ranged from passing comments to elaborate scenarios were already burgeoning by 1600 and flourished across the next two centuries in forms that connected erotically inflected desires, behaviors, and affiliations between women—and, more abstractly, female homoeroticism as idea and image—to the broad preoccupations of the times. The self-conscious reconfiguring of values and practices that marks emergent modernity induced not only the dramatic transformations evoked in my opening paragraph but a complex attention to female same-sex relations perceived not simply as modern but as emblematically so.⁴ Rather as gay marriage has become in recent years a charged site for concerns vaster than gays or marriage, intimacies between women became entangled with contests about authority and liberty, power and difference, desire and duty, mobility and change, order and governance. In short, the sapphic served the social imaginary as one way to confront challenges to the predictable workings of the universe.⁵

In The Sexuality of History, I will argue that the story of female same-sex affiliation that preoccupied emergent modernity can be read as a story of modernity tout court. Figuring as both agent and emblem, the sapphic became a flash-point for epistemic upheavals that threatened to dismantle the order of things. The quality and quantity, variety and geography of sapphic representation across the long period of reform, revision, revolution, and reaction from 1565 to 1830 point to investments far beyond sex between women. Imbuing female homoeroticism with powers and dangers exceeding any material challenge to the social order, the writings I explore in this book illuminate the ways in which the (il)logic of “woman + woman” became a testing ground for modernity’s limit points. Those writings provide us, in turn, with a testing ground for the relationship between sexual representation and social change.

By asking when, where, how, and to what ends the sapphic took form in print culture, this project seeks to flip the scholarly coin from the history of sexuality to the sexuality of history. Taking its name from Foucault’s paradigm-shifting volume,⁶ the field known as the history of sexuality has deconstructed the assumption that sexuality is an unchanging natural phenomenon and focused attention on the ways in which sexual concepts, images, values, and practices—including the (gendered) question of what counts as “sex”—reflect and inflect their social and cultural contexts. As Martha Vicinus articulated early on, historians of sexuality retrieve “lost or submerged histories,” study ideas and values about sex and sexual behavior in specific times and places, and analyze “structures of sexuality that are rooted in the social, economic, and political assumptions of the times.”⁷ The field of sexuality studies has investigated private lives and public opinions, historical facts and fictional fantasies, and it continues to illuminate the diversity of the world’s sexualities and their discursive manifestations both present and past.

A shift from the history of sexuality to the sexuality of history retains these interests but reverses the emphasis. The reversal is already implicit in Foucault’s contention that modern disciplinary regimes became newly preoccupied with “the manner in which each individual made use of his [sic] sex”⁸ and thrives in scholarship that considers the more than sexual implications of sexual configurations.⁹ In the spirit of that inquiry, though with a focus on the gender that Foucault almost wholly ignored, my approach reads history through, and as contingent on, sexuality rather than reading sexuality through, and as contingent on, history. Put more specifically if also sententiously, I am concerned less with asking how early modern Europe configured the sapphic than with asking how the sapphic configured early modern Europe. In contrast to the project of queer reading, whereby scholars expose embedded homoerotic content in “closeted” texts, I look for the breadth of concerns and interests that may be embedded in more obviously erotic surfaces. I am thus not quite looking for lesbians by whatever name, in beds or in books, but rather exploring the ways in which a historically specific interest in lesbians intersects with and stimulates systemic concerns that may (seem to) have little to do with sexuality per se.

In short, I hope to show not only that sexuality has a history but that sexuality is history: that just as the historical constructs the sexual, so too does the sexual construct the historical, shaping the social imaginary and providing a site for reading it. I am not, of course, claiming that discourses about female affiliations brought down regimes or altered Europe’s course. But in the spirit of my epigraph from the economist Jean-François Melon, I do believe in the intricate and unpredictable but nonetheless multifarious overlaps among spheres of social and discursive practice. Not least among the implications of my inversion of terms is the possibility, largely ignored outside sexuality studies proper, that sexuality might be not only an effect but a stimulus and that sexual representations might thus have a kind of agency in organizing larger discursive frameworks and in fomenting or forestalling change. Indeed, I will argue that the sapphic constitutes a specific and even privileged site for studying culture writ large—that the insistent labeling of the sapphic as impossibility, in tandem with the production of that impossibility in text after text, underscores the ways in which “woman + woman” threatens to ravel the logic of an entire system. In making this claim, I underscore the dissonance between the apparently small material problem that female homoeroticism posed to Western Europe’s social order and the larger space and excessive language accorded it in print. The sapphic may have derived its efficacy from that very gap between the imagined and the real, offering a defamiliarizing, distracting, or distancing displacement from more pressing material challenges of statecraft and slavery, colonialism and class. The entanglement of the sapphic with these larger challenges of early modernity enables it to occupy the position that Barbara Babcock identifies in another context when she observes that “what is socially marginal is often symbolically central.”¹⁰

Supporting these large claims will be the challenge of the next six chapters of this book. My introductory chapter has a different goal: to outline the stakes and methods of the project in hope of contributing to a historiography that might “do” the sexuality of history, to turn a phrase of David Halperin.¹¹ Sexuality studies is already rich in approaches; it is not my intention to dislodge current practices but to augment them with what I hope will be a portable scholarly option. I do believe that a turn from the history of sexuality to the sexuality of history widens the avenues for intervention in several fields and thus enhances the relevance of sexuality to “mainstream” scholarship. Since I hope my methodological choices will carry a value independent of the persuasive power of any specific chapter or contention in this book, I have given those choices a fuller articulation on their own behalf.

In arguing for the significance of sapphic representations to history writ large, this project seeks to ameliorate both a heteronormativity in gender history and a gender imbalance in queer studies. In working comparatively across a wide (though Eurocentric) geographic, chronological, and generic terrain, it offers a counterpoint to tendencies within sexuality studies to address single cultures, private lives, and typological patterns. It articulates a strategy of confluence for positing interrelationships among texts that in turn supports a speculative approach to sexual history. And for the most part, it deploys a practice situated midway between close and distant reading to grapple with salient patterns in sets of texts. Through this aggregate of commitments, I hope as well to push against the supplementary status of lesbian studies by understanding the sapphic as a potentially paradigm-shifting phenomenon. I would go so far as to invert the conventional wisdom that modernity consolidates a heteronormative order to argue that modernity can also be read as the emergence of the sapphic as an epistemic plausibility.

LOCATING SAPPHIC SUBJECTS

In choosing the sapphic as the focus for a sexuality of history and in deferring gender to the subtitle of this book, I mean to signal the value of moving female homoeroticism to the center of sexuality studies as an unmarked case. The paradigms encouraged by Foucault’s elision of women and gender from The History of Sexuality have long concerned feminist theorists, and it does not take much research to see that what Sheila Jeffreys has called “male gay cultural forms” still dominate queer studies in a “ghosting through assimilation” that Terry Castle was already exposing in 1993.¹² The problem is tautological: because projects using “queer,” “homosexual,” or “sexuality” as their banner often focus more heavily on men, masculine rubrics end up marking allegedly gender-inclusive or gender-neutral terms, perpetuating the androcentric cycle. Moreover, two decades after Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s well-known axiom that the relationship between sexuality and gender cannot be determined in advance, queer theory still tends to constitute sexuality as a progressive and fluid “vanguard” that, as Biddy Martin argued, would relegate both feminism and femininity—and, I would add, the signifier “lesbian” itself—to anachronism while “the more radical work of queering the world proceeds.”¹³ That these problems have persisted despite a burgeoning scholarship on female homoeroticism suggests a tacit acceptance of the marginality of “lesbian” in distinction to the growing cachet of “queer.”

By contrast, this project is guided by the conviction that gender must be theorized in tandem with sexuality in any project of queer history, whether focused on women or on men. What Joan Scott modestly called a “useful” category of analysis seems to me crucial so long as we are dealing with the human world as it has been rather than the world we might desire;¹⁴ certainly in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe the idea of a gender-free anywhere is literally utopian; even claims that the mind had no gender, precisely because they needed to be advanced only on behalf of women, are signs of gender’s pervasive force. This recognition does not mean clinging to gender, to evoke a concern articulated by Robyn Wiegman among others; it means recognizing with Tom King that “gender is itself a social relation obtaining only through its materialization as practice.”¹⁵ Katherine Binhammer illustrates just this contingent relationship when she shows how a “mindful heterosexuality” grounds the gender identity forged in feminist writings of the 1790s.¹⁶ Such a demonstration supports David Valentine’s claim that the relationship between gender and sexuality is “ultimately ethnographic and historical rather than purely theoretical” and thus always a matter of “historically located social practice.”¹⁷ Even more than I had expected, the representations I examine in this book reveal imbrications of gender and sexuality, constituted in tandem with volatile vectors of class/rank and nation/race, at the heart of the ways in which the sapphic signifies in early modernity.

It is therefore plausible that the separate pursuit of “gay” and “lesbian” history is less “artificial,” as Diane Watt describes it, than conditional, as Sedgwick suggests in Epistemology of the Closet.¹⁸ Across significant theoretical differences, for example, Bernadette Brooten and David Halperin agree that male dominance and marital inequality have forged dramatic distinctions in the construction of male and female sexualities that in turn produce incommensurabilities between gay and lesbian history. In her pathbreaking Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism, Brooten reminds us that “historians who have conceptualized female homoeroticism as parallel to male homoeroticism have overlooked crucial historical evidence that could help us understand the history of female homoeroticism and periodize it properly.”¹⁹ Halperin argues that women “must submit to a system of compulsory heterosociality” and that “sexual relations among women” therefore “represent a perennial threat to male dominance, especially whenever such relations become exclusive and thereby take women out of circulation among men.”²⁰ Brooten further suggests that continuities of patriarchal prerogative may explain what she sees as responses to erotic relations between women that are more static than responses to relations between men.

This recognition of persistent gender dominance might well qualify the claim of my epigraph that a “blow” to one sphere inevitably affects others; Judith Bennett may be right to argue that a “patriarchal equilibrium” kept European women in a kind of stasis “even in times of political, social, and economic change.”²¹ But I will propose that the copious representation of the sapphic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries already dislodges that equilibrium or at least recognizes that it might be dislodged, opening fissures in the relationship between woman’s place and other social systems that intensify the potential agency of sapphic subjects. Thus, for example, although Alan Bray’s The Friend echoes Halperin and Brooten in noting that “friendship has been no less asymmetrical than gender itself,” when he reaches the seventeenth century Bray sees signs that women’s friendship has now begun to inflect the public sphere.²² Given the androcentrism both of early modern cultures and of late modern queer studies, we may need a deeper understanding of how the sapphic operates in order to perform the full integration that sexuality studies ultimately needs; histories of sexuality that are fully gender-inclusive will be of immense value, but simply to “add women and stir” will not resolve the deeper and historically variant deviations between male and female erotic histories.

The challenge of studying gender and sexuality in tandem is not, however, exclusive to queer studies, for lesbian history has fared little better under the rubric of “women” than under the rubric of “queer.” Despite old quips that women’s studies is a “lesbian plot,” seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women’s history, at least, remains quite heavily heteronormative. While I have addressed this issue more extensively elsewhere,²³ a motivating purpose of this book is to demonstrate the historical significance of sapphic formations for understandi...